Case study · grüum
How grüum grew revenue 13.3% year over year on Urumi.
From timeouts to +13.3%. Revenue is up 13.3% year over year on Urumi. The revenue-leaking bugs are fixed, and with a store that no longer slows down or falls over under load, the team runs more campaigns. Mobile loads dropped 93% (cached 4s → 0.3s, uncached 5.7s → 0.4s), and the platform held 1.2M requests a day at 99.99% uptime with zero incidents through peak weeks. Here's how.
Headline numbers
- +13.3% revenue, year over year, on Urumi
- −93% mobile load (cached 4s → 0.3s)
- 5.7s → 0.4s uncached response time
- 99.99% uptime
- 0 incidents through peak weeks
- 1.2M req/day sustained production traffic
Engagement timeline
- Week 0 — Discovery + audit. Founders walked grüum's store with George — traffic patterns, plugin stack, the cold starts. Written audit + fix plan delivered.
- Week 1–2 — Cache + server config. Cloudflare misconfig fixed, server tuned, PHP worker config rebuilt. Cached responses dropped 4s → 0.3s.
- Week 3–4 — Hot paths + N+1 fixes. Application hot paths optimised, N+1 queries eliminated, WooCommerce Product Bundles patch shipped. Uncached 5.7s → 0.4s.
- Week 5+ — Migration + ongoing ops. Moved onto Urumi's infrastructure. P99 under 900ms, zero incidents through the peak weeks that followed — and a store that can take more campaigns.
The context
When Urumi engaged with grüum.com, the team wanted to resolve instability customers could feel: page loads climbing to 5–7 seconds, cold starts of up to ~40 seconds, and checkouts timing out at exactly the wrong moments.
"I'm very happy with the results. The biggest performance improvements we've seen is from you guys."
George Lagonikas · Founder & CTO, grüum
The shift
In plain English: their site got fast and stayed fast. The engineer's view of what we found and what we fixed is below.
Urumi worked directly with George and the grüum team to identify root causes across caching, server configuration, and application hot paths. The focus was on fixing both the "everyday" slow paths and the unpredictable extremes that make a site feel unreliable.
From this work, grüum saw a shift around:
- Cloudflare + caching misconfigurations were identified and fixed.
- Performance hot paths were identified and fixed; a patch was provided to the WooCommerce Product Bundles team.
- Server configuration was optimized so workers could use the available infra more effectively.
- Latency-inducing N+1 query issues were fixed (traces went to almost 0 post-deploy).
- Cold starts caused by unoptimized PHP worker config were eliminated.
Cached requests went from 4s to 0.3s. Uncached requests dropped from 5.7s to 0.4s.
The outcome: revenue up 13.3% year over year
Revenue is up 13.3% year over year on Urumi — with the store holding 1.2M req/day at 99.99% uptime and zero incidents through its peak weeks.
Over the same period, two things changed on the store. The revenue-leaking bugs were fixed: checkouts that timed out and carts dropped during cold starts now complete. And with a store that no longer slows down or falls over under load, the team runs more campaigns, more often — launches and promotions that used to be a risk are now just another day.
The grüum team validated the improvements with stress tests mimicking real user journeys (browse → login → add to cart → order):
- Average response time: 740ms with p95 at 3.03s
- Stress testing: Avg 770.09ms, Median 314.14ms, P90 1620ms
- Sustained well beyond grüum's 1.2M req/day production load, with p90 under ~2s at 300 VU
They went from customers abandoning checkout due to timeouts to completing orders without friction.
"The platform paid for itself in the first few months, and third-party integrations went from weeks of work to a conversation."
George Lagonikas · Founder & CTO, grüum
Frequently asked questions
Did grüum's revenue grow after moving to Urumi?
Yes. grüum's revenue is up 13.3% year over year on Urumi. Over the same period, checkout timeouts and cold-start cart drops were fixed, mobile loads dropped 93%, and the store ran more campaigns with zero incidents through peak weeks.
How much faster did grüum's store get?
Mobile page loads dropped 93%. Cached responses went from 4 s to 0.3 s and uncached responses from 5.7 s to 0.4 s, with P99 under 900 ms after the move onto Urumi's infrastructure.
Did grüum's store stay up through peak weeks?
Yes. The store served 1.2M requests a day at 99.99% uptime with zero incidents through its peak weeks, and the team now treats launches and promotions as ordinary days rather than risks.
What did Urumi fix on grüum's WooCommerce store?
CDN and caching misconfiguration, untuned PHP workers that caused cold starts of up to ~40 seconds, N+1 database queries on the hot paths, and a performance issue in WooCommerce Product Bundles that Urumi patched upstream. The store then moved onto Urumi's infrastructure with ongoing operations handled by Urumi.
What this means for stores like yours.
grüum's numbers came from fixing the things that quietly slow every high-traffic WooCommerce store — misconfigured caching, N+1 database queries, untuned PHP workers, cold starts that the team only notices when checkout drops.
The free audit starts with the same diagnostic. We look at your traffic patterns, your plugin stack, your custom code, and the exact moments your store slows down for customers. Within a week you have a written audit + fix plan — yours to share internally, whether or not we end up running your operations.
"The results speak for themselves—I'm really happy we worked with Urumi."
George Lagonikas · Founder & CTO, grüum
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